Robert Hamill was walking home from St Patrick’s Hall in Portadown on
the night of April 27th 1997, along with three friends. When they
arrived in the centre of Portadown he and one of his friends were
attacked by a crowd of about 30 loyalists. As they kicked and punched
Robert, some of them were shouting:”Kill him, Kill him!” and “Die, you
Fenian bastards!” An RUC land rover was parked nearby. Inside the land
rover were four RUC officers. None of them intervened. It emerged later
that some of the RUC people in the land rover were personal friends of
some of the loyalists involved in the beating.

Robert Hamill was seriously injured that night and taken to hospital. He
was on a life support for ten days. He died of his injuries on 8th May
1997.None of the loyalists was arrested that night. They had time to
destroy forensic evidence. Seven different statements were released by
the RUC over the following days giving conflicting accounts of what
happened. On the 28th April, 1997, the day after the attack, five
loyalists from Portadown were arrested. On 12th May a sixth loyalist was
arrested. After being in custody for five months five of the six men
were released. The judge sympathised with them ‘on their ordeal’. Some
time later the sixth man was released.

On 24th November 1997, at the request of the family solicitor, Rosemary
Nelson, I accompanied members of the Hamill family to meet the then
Secretary of State, Mo Mowlam. Robert Hamill’s sister, Diane, presented
Mo Mowlam with a petition with 20,000 signatures calling on her and the
British government to set up an Independent Public Inquiry into the
circumstances of Robert’s murder. It also called for the suspension of
the four RUC officers who watched as Robert and his friends were
attacked by the loyalist gang. Mo Mowlam expressed her sympathy but said
that her hands were tied regarding setting up a Public Inquiry. She did
not seem to be well informed about the case and when I told her what the
judge had said when he released the suspects she said she had not heard
that before. A senior civil servant, Mr Steele, accompanied her at the
meeting and told us that the Independent Commission for Police
Complaints(ICPC) was already investigating and we should await the
outcome of the findings and we should have no reservations about their
independence. We told Mo Mowlam that we had no confidence in such an
investigation. Time proved us right.

Clearly, there was little chance of the Hamill family getting justice
when the RUC was in charge of the investigation and the judiciary was
sympathetic to those loyalists who were charged. When Diane Hamill
informed Mo Mowlam that the four RUC officers in the land rover that
night had taken “sick leave” and were seeking compensation for trauma,
Mo Mowlam said she was not aware of that. She said that she would make
inquiries and that we would hear from her office in a short time with
answers to our concerns. We never heard anything. It was clear to us
that the securocrats were running the show.

Members of the Hamill family along with their solicitor, Rosemary
Nelson, continued to campaign for justice for Robert. I joined them and
many others in a public protest outside Belfast City Hall on the first
anniversary of his murder. Members of the family were continually
subjected to sectarian abuse by loyalists. Rosemary Nelson was killed on
15th March 1999, when a booby trap bomb was placed under her car at her
home in Lurgan. There is strong suspicion of collusion between the RUC
and loyalists in her murder. The RUC had, on many occasions, while
interviewing nationalists, said that she was a target. The Loyalists
printed vicious leaflets about her accusing her of being a bomb-maker.

During 1997 there were a number of other Catholics attacked and killed.
This coincided with the emergence of the Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF)
led by Billy Wright and Mark Fulton. This group is thought to have been
responsible for the killing of GAA man, Sean Brown, Bernadette Martin
and her boyfriend, James Morgan, Gerry Devlin and Seamus Dillon. These
were all killed by loyalists in 1997.

Unionist politicians who preached bigotry over many years (“I would not
have a Catholic about my place”) must bear a heavy responsibility for
the hatred shown towards Catholics generally in this part of Ireland.
Robert Hamill was an innocent man walking home with friends from a night
out in St Patrick’s Hall. He was set upon by the Billy boys and beaten
to death. His only crime was that he was a Catholic. This is the kind of
society that the British created when they decided to set up an Orange
six county statelet. They too bear a great responsibility for the
visceral hatred of Catholics by loyalists who support this artificially
constructed British colony.

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